He can feel his cowardice chasing him down like braying hellhounds, scenting his blood and running the trail behind him. It’s almost as intense an emotion as the guilt he feels as his hind hooves strike against skin, muscle, and sinew. It reverberates up his hind legs, the strike pushing him farther forward onto his bad leg until he’s jerking and stumbling as he flees. She is huge and intimidating in her half-blooded godliness, but he hears her wheeze and capitulate beneath his own formidable power nonetheless. It echoes in his ears, drives him stumbling in the sand and surf away from her, wondering if she’d forgive him should he simply refuse to stop running. How he had escaped unscathed so far wasn’t something floating around inside his brain, in that moment. His emotions were too volatile, too close to the surface to reason against or fight through. Instead he flees, trying not to wonder whether the sound of her pained wheeze would haunt him like Resplendence’s screams still did.
 
Even as he contemplates his cowardly escape, he instinctively tucks his right wing against his sides, not wanting to obscure his peripheral vision. The delicate bones invert towards the shelter behind his shoulder as if sentient, the reminder of Bronze’s attack and the feeling of hooves smashing down upon them from the Time God battle making him far more leery than normal. Everything is warring inside him; self-hatred for his cowardice, despair over hurting Isopia, determination to win to prove to himself that maybe he wasn’t as broken and useless as he thought. It’s wiped away by the sound of sucking, shushing hoofbeats, wonders in some odd half-space in his head whether Isopia hates fighting in sand as much as he does. Only when he feels sand spray up against his hind right leg does he realize that she’s pursuing him for a reason, and his twisting emotions are his downfall. They take up too much space inside Kaj’s head, buzzing like angry hornets, and he reacts too slow once he finally realizes that, hey you big idiot, you’re still fighting. He falters, hooves skidding in the sand, what little momentum he has mustered dying out as he tries to swing his front half to the left, give her less space to land her attack. It doesn’t work as well as he’d hoped, his injured leg incapable of that kind of speed and agility any longer.
 
As fire soaks through the muscles of his left shoulder, Kaj sees the blur of her death-marked face and knows he can’t avoid her. The thought is barely done forming when she strikes, and maybe with another opponent it would have been less painful but she is as powerful (more, perhaps, if he allows his already wounded pride to admit it) and her attack is far more painful than any other. Her horns slice up the meat of his right hindquarter, kissing the top of his hip like a scalding brand before jerking free, deep enough for blood and with enough of a punch from her power to bruise. His reaction is immediate, warping around the pain and how it draws him back screaming and kicking into the past where pain meant you had to strike or die. Forehooves dig into the forgiving sand, neck arching and head tucking as he keeps his hindquarters low, hoping she’s still moving with how his shoulder had stalled his own attempts at speed. They strike out, skin pulling and blood oozing sluggishly from the dull, painful scrapes as he kicks at the joint of her left hind leg. It’s Resplendence all over again, but he’s back in that hellish black and white world of kill or be killed. Falls into the muted silence like a body into a grave, too tired to fight his own emotions. Kaj welcomes the embrace of familiarity as his hind hooves touch down once more, uses his strong, functioning right foreleg to spin himself to the right towards where he hopes Isopia is, teeth glinting in the afternoon sunlight. There is no block and parry here, where he cowers defeated and tired in the silence of his mind, hiding behind instinct and bloodied memories.
 
Instead he lunges for her, teeth aiming for the meaty flesh of the left side of her crest, throwing all of his formidable weight to the right to try and slam into the bone of her left wing. If it lands, he hopes it will scrape his teeth down the width of her neck, each action planned for maximum effect in his hindbrain. He’d held to his sanity and morality the entire fight, but he is weak. Kaj is a coward, and he knows it as he lets his mind go blank.